


All Lines Parallel Must Converge

by sayhitoforever



Category: Bleach
Genre: Happy Ending, Human AU, M/M, actual fanfiction superfan riruka, canonically confirmed bookworm ichigo, fourth wall break inside of a fourth wall, i said what i said, that's like sixteen walls, the bookstore AU no one asked for, unrestrained valentine's day suffering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29411052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayhitoforever/pseuds/sayhitoforever
Summary: Grimmjow buys a novel from a secondhand bookstore that’s shoved full of old luggage tickets with notes scrawled on them. He falls just a little bit in love with whoever wrote them.
Relationships: Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 25
Kudos: 64





	All Lines Parallel Must Converge

**Author's Note:**

> For all of your Valentine's Day reading needs.💖
> 
> This will be a short series, maybe only 3 parts. Just something to help me shake the brain rot a little bit. Hope you enjoy! 💖

**~**

Grimmjow buys the book from a local secondhand bookstore he wanders into to escape a sudden deluge of rain. 

He’s standing just a step aside from the door, dripping wet, and cursing under his breath as he peers through the front window up at the dark clouds that had rolled in swiftly. He’s not the only one in there who seems to have slid in for protection from the weather though. There’s an assortment of wet umbrellas propped against the window behind an unoccupied table beside the door. Briefly, he considers snatching one and leaving a couple bucks in its place until a rip of thunder shakes the entire building and the rain starts coming down _sideways._ Glaring up at the sky like his sour face could part the clouds, Grimmjow heaves in a breath, pushes his wet hair off his forehead, and turns to face the rows of books. 

It’s an aesthetically pleasing space, he can admit. He’s not much of a reader, but there’s something strangely appealing about all the warmth of dark wood bookshelves winding to the back of the store, lining the walls and the balcony of the second floor. Somewhere, in the back maybe, he can smell coffee, rich and comforting. Grimmjow unzips his jacket and wipes the worst of the water on his hands on his dry shirt beneath. His hair is steadily dripping down his neck, soaking the collar of said shirt, but the bookstore is warm enough that it keeps the chill away. Another crack of thunder behind him says that he might as well peruse the titles and get comfortable unless he wants to be soaked to his skin by the time he gets home. 

He runs the tips of cold fingers along the spines of books, hauling in lungfuls of coffee, old paper, and petrichor. Grimmjow wanders without stopping through the political section, stops in the theology stacks and skims a book on esoteric Christianity before returning it to its proper spot. He steps over people comfortably seated on the floor, stacks of books beside them, winds his way around those huddled among the shelves, heads bent over open books. He snags a thick volume that boasts two hundred autumn themed recipes from the cookbook section, knowing his sister will love it, before strolling into the shelves housing classic literature. There are a few titles he recognizes from his schooling when he was younger, and many more he doesn’t. 

Nimble fingers pull down a book from a high shelf, spine cradled in his palm and he glances at the cover. Charles Dickens, go fuckin’ figure, but at least not one he ever remembers reading before. Grimmjow casts a furtive glance at the front window of the bookstore again before resigning himself with a sigh to lean against the shelf and crack the book open. 

It opens to what might as well be a predestined page, one that has a slip of blank paper tucked into it like a makeshift bookmark. Frowning, Grimmjow plucks it from the pages and turns it over. It’s creased through the middle, bent over and over so many times that the edges of the fold are beginning to tear a little. An old luggage ticket, all glossy paper that’s lost some of its sheen, the bottom quarter of it a peel-away sticker with a long barcode, a jumble of nonsensical numbers and letters for flight information, and the date. It’s marked for Heathrow Airport in London and the date is from almost eight months ago. 

It’s the top half that has Grimmjow’s undivided attention though. The part that’s supposed to be totally blank, the space left from where the attendant peels it off and tapes it to your bag. It’s been written on in black ink with a neat hand on an angle, slanting down the narrow strip of the luggage ticket.

_Strange to dream of you  
even when I am wide awake. _

It’s stupid, he knows, but the words send a strange, almost violent thrill rushing through him. A quiet confession, written in a terminal on the other side of the world, or maybe tens of thousands of feet in the sky. It almost feels like an invasion of privacy having read it, despite the fact that the note had been left in a book that its owner had obviously given away. Grimmjow reads it a few times over, memorizing the slant of the letters, the press of the pen against the ticket and the indents it left. He puts the ticket back precisely as he’d found it, written side down, and runs his thumb along the remaining chunk of pages ahead of the bookmark. 

The pad of his thumb catches on a different page, much closer to the beginning, and another rush swoops through him. Grimmjow leafs to that page, casting a glance surreptitiously over his shoulder as though he’s expecting to find someone lurking behind him. And there’s a second luggage ticket tucked between the pages just like the first one. 

“Fuck,” he curses softly as a fat droplet of rainwater drips from his hair into the book, the spot blooming across the bottom of the page like a tiny thumbprint. Grimmjow cards a hand through his droopingly wet hair, pushing it back from his forehead as best he can before wiping his hand on his shirt again. 

There’s far more writing on this ticket when he turns it over, all cramped to fit, in the same tidy penmanship. 

_She loved me for the dangers I had passed,  
And I loved her that she did pity them._  
_This only is the witchcraft I have used._  
I-III 169-171 

Grimmjow doesn’t recognize the writing and there’s no name or title to accompany the cite. But the date on this ticket is only from a few days ago and it ignites something in his gut, a pilot light. It drives him to close the book and hold it tight, making sure no other secrets can come fluttering out of the pages, and head for the register. Outside, the rain is still coming down in sheets, and the gutters he can see across the way are gushing full. 

“Hey, can you tell me who donated this book?” Grimmjow asks the young girl with the magenta hair behind the register. 

She’s got it tied in pigtails, a slouching white beanie pulled down over blunted bangs. The nametag pinned to the lapel of her black cardigan reads _Riruka_ with a faded, pink heart sticker following it. Her eyes grow until they are comically wide as she gives him the equivalent of a thrice-over, stare darting from his soaked black jacket to his straggling blue hair to his damp white shirt to his sharp blue eyes. 

“Um, probably not?” she squeaks, wandering gaze finally settling on the book in his hands. “We don’t take customer names down, just issue receipts and cash or store credit.” 

“Shit,” Grimmjow swears, shaking his head. Just his fuckin’ luck. Wet and disappointed. There’s a joke in there somewhere. The girl is staring at the book though, like she’s divining answers from the title half-covered by Grimmjow’s long fingers. 

“Actually, the title is kind of familiar,” she murmurs, leaning forward a little across the counter. She startles slightly as Grimmjow’s head snaps back up to look at her. “If that’s the book I’m remembering, then it just got donated a few days ago.” 

And the date on the luggage ticket is only from a few days ago too. 

“Girl or guy?” Grimmjow demands as she lights up with a big, mischievous smile. The crooked grin transforms her face from something innocent and young, all pale skin and big eyes, to evil incarnate in a matter of seconds. 

“Definitely a guy,” she says with an enthusiastic nod and a little spark of hope rekindles in Grimmjow’s chest. “Total hottie too. Orange hair, chocolatey brown eyes, and a jawline sharp enough to cut diamonds.” She sighs dreamily and Grimmjow tries not to follow suit. He’d always had a thing for orange. “Why do you ask?” 

He ignores the question to ask one of his own instead. “Can you tell me what the other books are that he dropped off?” 

“I might have a copy of the inventory receipt somewhere,” she muses aloud, sounding a little too cheeky for Grimmjow’s taste. “Again, why do you ask?” 

He’s hesitant to say for a moment, realizing just how utterly batshit the words sound in his head. But Grimmjow has never been one to back down from something he wants, so he hauls in a breath while she stares at him. “There are luggage tags in this book, but no name, and they’ve got notes written on them, messages.” Grimmjow fights the heat that’s rising in his cheeks as the girl’s mouth slowly drops open, eyes wide as teacup saucers. 

“Oh _my god_ ,” she all but squeals and if her pupils could physically reshape into cartoon hearts, Grimmjow is sure they would have. “It’s happening! Oh, this is so amazing!” 

Grimmjow rocks back on his heels a little and narrows his eyes to stare at her suspiciously. “ _What’s_ happening?” 

Riruka slaps her palms on the countertop multiple times and jumps up and down a little, pigtails swinging back and forth. The look in her eyes that are nearly the same color as her hair —contacts, Grimmjow thinks absently— is near manic now. “ _Bookstore romance. Star crossed lovers._ ” 

Grimmjow blinks as she lets out a squeal of excitement that somehow manages not to draw the attention of every other patron. “Do they let you drink on the job?” he hisses out, half-tempted to reach across the counter and put a hand over mouth, despite what that would look like. 

“I have read _so many_ fanfictionstories about this very scenario, but I never thought it would actually happen!” 

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just admit that out loud.” Grimmjow is starting to regret ever approaching the girl at the register to have this conversation. He should have just bought the book and said nothing, harbored it like a secret at home before tucking it into a shelf where it could taunt him endlessly. Full of questions never to be answered, a story with a beginning but no end. 

“You want to know if you can find his name in another book!” There’s a determined set in Riruka’s jaw now and a gleam in her eyes that means business beyond average bookstore matters. 

Grimmjow wants to say that’s almost too good a guess, but it’s only half correct. He also wants the other tickets, if they exist in these supposed other books. What if it was just this book that had the tickets? Why the fuck did Grimmjow think there would be more _luggage_ tickets? Assholes rich enough to fly internationally on the monthly definitely didn’t write shit like this, _right_? Or had he been misjudging his actual potential to be a trophy husband all this time?

She makes a show up flipping her hair over her shoulders and crossing her arms, giving Grimmjow a scrutinizing, narrow-eyed stare. Grimmjow, who is not unfamiliar with getting jumped in his youth, has never felt so sized up before. Whatever she’s looking for in that moment, she must find it and likes what she sees, because she uncrosses one arm to tap lightly at her chin in thought. 

“He comes in here every couple of months with a load of books to donate,” Riruka comments. “So, he’s either a crazy book lover or a university student on break. Or both.” 

Grimmjow’s chest gives a sharp squeeze. He could work with university student, considering that was his own age range. Fuck only knows if this chick was into older dudes and her idea of a jawline strong enough to cut diamonds was actually some fifty-year-old retiree who’d gotten a little too into steroids and the gym. 

Riruka stoops over to rifle around behind the counter for something. She withdraws a jam-packed binder and thumps it down on the countertop, flipping it open and passing the first few pages. Each page is filled with cramped, Unabomber handwriting that’s impossible for Grimmjow to read upside down, even as Riruka runs her fingers down each line before turning the page. Filled with what looks like the date and time at the top and a list of all the books any individual sold at the same time. She scans each page about five or so more times before she stops.

“Alright, this is the most recent one.” She pops the tabs on the binder and lifts the sheet from the rings. Grimmjow leans forward across the counter, forgetting himself for a moment, in a desperate effort to read all the tiny titles still facing the wrong way, and there are quite a few of them. “This document isn’t supposed to leave this binder, so you have ten minutes to find all these books or I’ll have to kick your ass.”

Grimmjow’s head snaps up and he stares at her, going a little slack jawed. “Why? _What?_ ”

“If you want the older lists, it’s going to take me some time to go through all these slips.” She slaps the top of the papers with a resounding thud and Grimmjow winces a little. This was all… awfully fucking generous of this random bookstore employee to be doing. And she must read that hesitation in his narrowed gaze, because she rolls her eyes, and blows up to get her bangs out of her eyes. There’s still rainwater dripping from Grimmjow’s hair, down the back of his neck, and he must be standing under some kind of vent because he swears he can feel cold air blowing on him. He tries to suppress the shiver that skitters its way up his spine as he looks at her, unblinking and awkward.

“It’s not every day you get the chance to play the crafty matchmaker friend of the main character,” she admits, nodding sagely as if Grimmjow understands a single fucking thing she’s saying. Riruka sticks her unoccupied hand out over the countertop and holds it there. Her fingernails are painted as pink as her hair and they sparkle. “Please let me be your fairy godmother.” 

“Fuck, you’re weird,” Grimmjow says even as he lifts his own hand to shake hers. Cold meets warm and Riruka grasps his fingers so tightly he thinks his bones shift a bit.

“Nine minutes thirty-nine seconds, thirty-eight…”

He snatches the paper from her hand and spins it right way around and scans the list. Eleven books in total are listed — _god damn what was he even doing_ — in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. Coelho, Heller, Murakami, Vonnegut, book titles that almost ring a bell, but it’s been so long since Grimmjow even picked up a book, what the hell is he thinking? He’s got the Coelho in his hands, and feels relatively safe assuming that a university student owning a book that he pulled from the classic literature section might only be pulling from that pool. Grimmjow heads back to the stacks at a half-jog and cranks his head sideways to read the spines as fast as he can.

Atkinson, Kate is near the end of the A’s and it’s up so high that he actually has to stand on his tiptoes a bit to pull it down. He gets side-eyed by a mom with a baby on her hip that blows spit bubbles at him as he maneuvers around her to grab the Hellers, Joseph. One after the other, he piles the books into his arms until he can barely see over top of them, too afraid to rearrange them in case they all hit the floor.

Grimmjow can’t find the Murakami, Haruki though and to say something resembling the chill of sheer panic settles in his chest like fresh snow would be an understatement. He scans the entire M section twice over, book after book, and still can’t find it among them. _Kafka By The Shore,_ wasn’t Kafka a different author? Cockroaches? Why the fuck was he remembering cockroaches? Shit, was he looking in the wrong section of the fucking alphabet? He didn’t have the _time_ to look elsewhere, his ten minutes had to be up by now. Maybe if he brought all the books he had up, that tiny, pink-haired hellion would take some more pity on him and give him an extra five minutes.

He’s nearly panting as he dumps all the books on the counter while Riruka watches him, blowing a bubble with her gum that she quickly sucks back in and snaps. He reaches to push back his half-dry, straggling hair and nods at the mess he’s made.

“I couldn’t find the Murakami one,” he admits, feeling defeated in a way he hasn’t since he wrestled in high school. Ten out of eleven wasn’t good enough. What if that eleventh book he missed had a _name_ in it? What if that book was the one he really needed?

But Riruka reaches over and slides something across the counter towards them, picking it up to show him the cover, all soft blues with the solid outline of a white cat near the spine, with a soft smirk. “I figured, so I grabbed it for you.”

He exhales so heavily he feels like he deflates a little as she scans that one first. “We’re closed on Sundays,” she goes on to say as she scans the McCarthy next. “So, come back on Tuesday and maybe I’ll have found another list for you.”

“Ya skipped a day there,” Grimmjow says, trying to mentally calculate through the haze of his adrenalin finally petering out.

“You’re gonna have your hands full for at least the next two days,” she scoffs as she leans all the way over the counter to grab one of the canvas bags hanging on the front of the register. “Trust me,” she concludes as she rings the rest of the books up, placing them gently into the bag.

Each book gets tucked almost lovingly away, and with each one, Riruka marks a small red X on the inventory sheet that Grimmjow had handed back to her. It was impossible to say if she was doing it for the store’s own bookkeeping records or as some sort of further assistance to Grimmjow, and he didn’t want to think much on it. Eleven books. Where the hell was he going to find the time to finish all those by Tuesday? Considering he had to work on Monday too, he isn’t so sure he can finish all these books before she wanted him to come back. But god damn if he isn’t gonna try. 

“Do you still want the cookbook?”

“What?” Grimmjow replies on instinct, pulled from his wandering.

“The cookbook?” Riruka reiterates, and points at the two hundred autumn themed monstrosity he’d grabbed before this entire shitshow started.

“Shit, yeah, that’s fine.” Nel would appreciate it and, the more he considered it, the better a coverup he could use it as if she ever got nosy about this new stash of books he was about to bring home. They were supposed to get lunch together tomorrow, he could give it to her then and tell her all about getting stuck in the rain and how he saw the cookbook and thought of her. She ate up sentimental shit like that.

“That’ll be $93.89.”

“Jesus,” he mutters under his breath as he fishes his wallet out from his back pocket.

“Better than the jacket price you would have had to buy them for at a chain bookstore,” Riruka insists with a scowl, as if Grimmjow has insulted the business she works for.

“Easy, Cujo,” he says as he forks over his debit card which she all but seizes from his hand.

“That’s a book too, you know,” she announces a little haughtily as she swipes his card and holds her hand over the printer, waiting for the receipt. Grimmjow just groans as she fishes a pen with a fake daisy taped to the end of it out of the cup beside the register and hands it and one of the receipts to him.

A dreary, rainy afternoon reading books is not the way Grimmjow would have originally thought he’d end his day. But, as Nel had been insisting over and over to no end, Grimmjow had grown stagnant in his life. Work, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. His job didn’t afford him much free time, all crunch deadlines and long hours looking at autocad until his eyes crossed sometimes. She said he needed people in his life that weren’t just her and his trainer at the gym. People were easy for Nel though, she exuded amiability and approachableness, never without a smile. So, maybe books and whoever was on the other end of those curious luggage tag notes could be the answer.

As half an afterthought as he pulls the strap of the bag over his shoulder, he extends his hand to her again. “Grimmjow,” he says by way of introduction.

“Riruka,” she replies, giving him the same bone crunching handshake as she beams him a kilowatt smile.

“I know.” He nods at her nametag and she just frowns at him, waving him away as if she was shooing an annoying pet.

“Shut up, Beast. Go read your books so we can find your Belle.”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grimmjow calls over his shoulder as he heads for the front door.

“There’s hope for you yet!”

There’s a damp chill to the air as he opens the door, grey clouds hanging heavy and low, and Grimmjow blows hot air into his cold hands before shoving one deep into his jacket pocket, the other holding the strap of the bag carrying the books firmly. It’s only misting when he steps onto the sidewalk again, weighed down with far more than he came in with, save for the lightness in his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are _greatly_ appreciated and fuel my writing dumpster fire of a brain!
> 
> You can find me on Twitter acting a fool on the regular [here](https://mobile.twitter.com/sayhitoforeverr)  
> Join the GrimmIchi Discord [here!](https://discord.gg/u4TGnAkv)


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